Thursday, February 20, 2003

NEWS FLASHLET: Fire the Friendly

NEWS FLASHLET: Fire the Friendly Skies
I learn today from the radio that the arming of commercial pilots is going forward full steam ahead, so to speak.  Once they pass a psychological evaluation, our pilots will be enrolled in a program to teach them marksmanship, legal policy and terrorist-whacking.  I have a few questions:
1) Psych evaluation?  So, there are people flying around in jet liners filled with our most precious resource - voters - who wouldn’t be considered mentally fit to carry a handgun?  “Sorry, Jim, your profile didn’t match up sufficiently phlegmatic and saturnine.  We think you’d pose a potential risk carrying that derringer.  No hard feelings, right, you nutcase?  It’s all in the interest of our national insecurity complex.  Hey, see you after you land - the 777 is full of Heiniken and aviation fuel, and all the nuns and orphans are strapped helpless in their seats.  Today’s in-flight movie: Passenger 57.  Happy landings!”
2) I’ve seen it demonstrated in films that Peter Ustinov could be sucked out through the hole left in an airplane fusilage by a BB when an airplane is aloft.  Or, actually, pushed out, by the much greater air pressure inside the plane than outside.  This very phenomenon has been used to rid spacecraft of ants on the Simpsons (and, in the same episode, by reference, to rid James Taylor’s Nantucket beachhouse of similar pests).  So what the pilots need are big fat dummy bullets that shatter on impact, rather than passing freely through one’s fleshy matter and punching through the side of the plane.  And if they miss and just hit the side of the plane or one of the other passengers, they’ll have plenty of other chances to hit their target as the airplane plummets to the earth.  Assuming the gun doesn’t get sucked out the hole.  I do truly worry about hole-suck.
3) The best preventative for hijacking and such that I’ve ever heard was the pilot who announced to the passengers at the outset of the flight: “Be on the lookout.  Alert the attendants if you see anything that doesn’t seem right.  And keep in your seat with the belts fastened, because if terrorists strike I’m putting this damn plane in a barrelroll and dropping 15,000 feet in 30 seconds.  You’ll be able to scrape the bad guys off the ceiling after we land.”